Ants can learn from the opposite

In this work we present different learning strategies focused on detecting candidate solutions that are not interesting to be explored by a metaheuristic, in terms of evaluation function. We include a first step before the metaheuris-tic. The information obtained from this step is given to the metaheuristic, for visiting candidate solutions that are more promising in terms of their quality. The goal of using these strategies is to learn about candidate solutions that can be discarded from the search space, and thus to improve the search of the metaheuristic. We present two new strategies that differ on how the solutions can be constructed in an opposite way. Our approach is evaluated using Ant Solver, a well-known ant based algorithm for solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems. We show promising results that make our solution as good approach to apply in other metaheuristics.